Sacred Name

The sacred name movement claims that the real name of God is some form of YHVH. They also claim that all Christians must use the sacred name instead of Lord or God. The sacred name is a false teaching rooted in Babylonian Talmudism which can be proved by the absence of the tetragrammaton in the Greek New Covenant scriptures.

The sacred name movement also makes other claims such as that Christians must refer to Jesus only as Yahshua because they claim that Jesus' name in Greek, Ἰησοῦς, is somehow a reference to the pagan god Zeus. However, even if Ἰησοῦς is a reference Zeus, the oldest copies of the New Testament we have are in Greek and there are no extant Hebrew manuscripts of the New Testament if they ever even existed at all. Thus, the fact that the New Testament authors used the name Ἰησοῦς proves that it is acceptable for Christians to use it as well. Additionally, since it is true that in Hebrew Jesus' name is Yahshua, the fact that the New Testament authors used the Greek form of the name proves that it is acceptable to use another language's normal form of a name without having to duplicate the original name exactly.

Thus, the sacred name movement must necessarily cast doubt upon the record of the preservation of the New Testament scriptures by asserting that the New Testament was originally written in Hebrew. Even if the New Testament was originally written Hebrew, in regards to this particular matter it would be irrelevant since God chose not to preserve any supposed Hebrew versions.

The root misunderstanding of the Sacred Name teaching

The root misunderstanding among those teaching and believing that there is some special power or property in using the exact original sounds for God's name comes from a misapplication of the third commandment. The third commandment states: "Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain." The Sacred Name teaching focuses on a literal application of the word name. This is the same sort of misunderstanding among those that spell the word God when referencing the true God as "G-d." By omitting the letter "o" and replacing it with a hyphen these people somehow believe they are correctly reverencing God's name while at the same time obliterating it.

The proper understanding of the third commandment is that the concept of using someone's name is broader than merely the actual speaking of the name and includes the idea of authority. An illustration of this misunderstanding occurred when Jesus confronted the pharisees over the misuse of the religious authority they had in binding the consciences of people through their numerous extra laws.